Borrowing the line from Gilbert & Sullivan's HMS Pinafore: "Things are seldom as they seem, Skim milk masquerades as cream." It's as true here in the US today as it was in 19th century England, and its message explains how to understand and view our affairs of state and why the title of this essay was chosen - to reflect on our national federal holidays that, in fact, represent something much different than the stated reasons we commemorate them for. Eleven such holidays are reviewed below moving chronologically through the year post-New Year's Day discussed briefly at the end because it's part of the Christmas holiday season celebration.

Martin Luther King Day

Martin Luther King was a Baptist minister, political activist, renowned orator, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the most noted leader of the American civil rights movement until his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968, two months before Robert Kennedy met the same fate in a Los Angeles hotel a day after he won the Democrat primary in his campaign for the office of president that year. In mid-January, King's January 15 birthday is commemorated as a federal holiday as it has been since it was for the first time on January 20, 1986 after Ronald Reagan reluctantly signed the legislation authorizing it in November, 1983. He did it in spite of his personal opposition, only capitulating after the bill authorizing it was passed in both Houses of Congress with veto-proof margins.

After King's death in 1968, Representative John Conyers introduced a bill in the House to make his birthday a national holiday. It was a long struggle from then till it was finally achieved because of racist opposition in the Congress against honoring a black man led by former Senator Jesse Helms who accused Dr. King of having communist ties as well as making other outlandish slurs against his good name and accusing him of opposing the Vietnam war which he certainly did with passion and eloquence that may have led to his death.

Helms was a hard-liner throughout his public life (like too many others
in the Congress then and now), and his career was characterized by
mean-spiritedness and a lifelong opposition to democracy, diversity and
affirmative action as well as his racist support for segregation and
efforts to deny black people their constitutionally mandated rights.
Some may also remember his 1990 reelection campaign waged against
Harvey Gantt, the first black mayor of Charlotte, NC, in which Helms
disgracefully used a racist ad to counter his opponent's lead in the
polls. It was called "Hands" and showed a pair of white hands crumpling
a job-rejection letter with a narration explaining he was best
qualified and needed the job a racial quota gave to a less deserving
black man. It worked, overcoming Gantt's lead and helped reelect Helms
undeservedly.

Martin Luther King Day is the only national holiday commemorating an
African American, but it took over 15 long years of campaigning to get
it authorized and over two more before it was first observed. It took
even longer for Dr. King's day to be finally recognized in all 50
states for the first time on January 17, 2000. It likely only happened
at all because the Congress finally was moved to act after receiving a
petition with six million signatures that was the largest number ever
collected supporting a national issue. Sadly, it happened because an
assassin's bullet took his life much too soon.

To this day, the question remains: who killed Martin Luther King, but
it's not hard to imagine why. James Earl Ray was accused of being the
lone assassin, at first pleaded guilty in 1969 after being arrested
earlier and held in jail for eight months. He was sentenced to 99 years
in prison, never got a trial, and retracted his guilty plea three days
after making it claiming his lawyer deceived him - to no avail. The
case was closed and his fate was sealed even though later evidence
uncovered casts great doubt on his guilt. He nonetheless spent the rest
of his life in prison dying on April 23, 1998 at age 70. Today his name
is hardly ever mentioned in the dominant media nor is any attempt made
to clear it, which is no surprise.

But if Ray didn't do it, who then had a motive and might have. Every
year commemorating his birth, we note and honor Dr. King's memorable "I
have a Dream" speech while ignoring the most important of his dreams
including the speeches he made supporting them. King was the foremost
of our nation's civil rights advocates, but he also wanted to end the
country's long history of exploitative materialism and culture of
militarism supporting it. He wanted everyone's civil rights respected
and honored but also was dedicated to pursuing social justice,
promoting non-violence, and was unreservedly against war, becoming
increasingly vocal in his opposition to the one raging in Vietnam using
powerful language like calling the US government "the greatest purveyor
of violence in the world."

King had already won great victories in his civil rights battles with
the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of
1965 that for the first time gave African Americans the rights
guaranteed them under the Constitution that Jim Crow laws in the South
denied them for decades. It was his public stand on the other great
issues driving him that caused those in power concern. No King
commemorative today ever mentions his memorable "Beyond Vietnam" speech
delivered to clergy and the public on April 4, 1967, one year to the
day before he was assassinated in Memphis. It was an heroic and
spellbinding moment with Dr. King at his eloquent best calling for an
end to the war and violence. It also may have been a defining moment in
his life that had a single year left in it.

King knew he lived on the edge because of his beliefs and his ability
to reach and profoundly influence a vast audience in the country and
throughout the world. He rightfully believed his life was in danger and
it might just be a matter of time before it was taken. We don't know
for sure who, in fact, killed him if it wasn't James Earl Ray which
seems very unlikely based on the best evidence now known. We do know
who had motive, cause and easy opportunity to do it most any time or
place. We also know if the US government was behind it, what part of it
likely got the assignment.

It may have been the FBI with its long record of abuse against targeted
enemies of the state that includes extensive documentation of its
Cointelpro operations from the 1950s till the early 1970s but likely
never stopped and has to be more active than ever now in the age of
George Bush and its culture of illegal surveillance, witch-hunting, and
imperial justice. In earlier years, the FBI targeted organizations and
individuals on the left as well as those considered radical including
non-violent ones like The Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement,
and Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Dr.
King himself because of Director J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with the
civil rights leader and his near-fanatical efforts to defame and defile
him.

The CIA has an even more disturbing record of lawlessness as part of
its overall mandate to collect and analyze intelligence about foreign
governments, corporations, organizations and individuals as well as
conduct whatever covert, "black bag," or extrajudicial state-sponsored
assassinations assigned it that in half a century ran into the hundreds.

Since it was created in 1947, the CIA's record has been documented in
detail including in the works of author, researcher and former State
Department employee William Blum in his books Rogue State and Killing
Hope detailing the shameful record of US foreign policy and the CIA's
role in it since WW II. It includes carrying out state-sponsored
assassinations including those against foreign leaders unwilling to
surrender their nation's sovereignty to ours based on imperial
management with no outliers allowed - reason enough to remove them with
CIA operatives often assigned the task but taking care to do it with
enough discretion to make it look like the long arm of Washington was
uninvolved.

Through the years the methods used have included a "rogue element's
bullet, a hard to detect poison or an "unfortunate" plane crash that
was the method of choice to murder Panamian president Omar Torrijos in
1981 and Ecuadorian president Jaimi Roldos in a helicopter crash the
same year. Sometimes other "plane accidents" are like the one
CIA-trained Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) personnel, led by Ugandan-born
and US-trained Paul Kagame (at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas' Command and
General Staff College), arranged with surface-to-air missiles to shoot
down the aircraft carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and
Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira on April 6, 1994 that led to the
ethnic slaughter that year. It elevated "our guy" Major-General Kagame
to power and later to be president of Rwanda where he let US forces
operate freely in the country using it as a base to pursue the greater
prize Washington sought in the resource-rich Congo (DRC)even though it
took hundreds of thousands of innocent lives to do it and millions in
Congo where war for its spoils still continues but gets little
attention.

Probably the best known and most infamous state-sponsored assassination
was the CIA-orchestrated coup and murder of Chilean president Salvador
Allende on another September 11 in 1973. It ended the most vibrant
democracy in the Americas replacing it with the brutal 17 year
dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who unfortunately died on
December 10 without ever having to answer for his crimes against
humanity. So far neither have those in authority at CIA or higher-ups
in the Nixon administration like Henry Kissinger. He played a key role
in the coup plot, ironically the same year he won a Nobel Peace Prize,
as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State and now must check
with the State Department for legal advice before traveling abroad for
assurance he won't be served with a warrant for his arrest and
detention.

That kind of record through the years shows CIA and its operatives may
have been behind the murder of Martin Luther King to remove a powerful
voice whose influential opposition to war and support for non-violence
and social justice conflicted with this government's agenda of imperial
conquest for power and profit.

If one or more FBI, CIA or other US government assassins murdered
Martin Luther King, the federal holiday commemorating his birth mocks
him and stands as a shameless deceptive act dishonoring all he stood
and worked for in his short 39 year life. It also makes his day of
observance an act of collective guilt by the nation responsible for
ending a noble life that might have accomplished far more if he'd had a
chance to continue pursuing the goals he hoped to achieve but never got
the chance. Maybe that was the whole idea and the reason he wasn't
allowed to go on with his work.

Presidents' Day

Presidents' Day is observed on the third Monday of February, was
formerly celebrated as Washington's Birthday, and now states have the
option to use either designation or some other one if they choose as
Alabama does commemorating Washington and Jefferson Day. They can also
pick another day as Georgia does observing Washington's birthday the
day after Christmas.

The period around this time is often used as an occasion for schools to
teach students the history of US presidents, especially Washington,
Jefferson, Lincoln and some of our other noted ones. If only that
occasion were used to teach real history (like found in Howard Zinn's A
People's History of the United States) instead of the fiction leading
young minds to believe these historic leaders were larger than life
heros, noble in purpose and service to the nation in its highest
office, and now deserving to be revered and remembered with a few
further immortalized in granite sculpture carving at the Mount Rushmore
National Memorial on stolen Lakota Sioux land in South Dakota's Black
Hills.

No past president gets more reverential treatment than our first, the
general who led the Continental Army against the British in the
nation's war of liberation from the Crown. He became our first
president by coronation because he ran unopposed twice, and he's now
known as the "Father of the Country" because he was its leader in war
and then "selected" as its first head of state. Students are never
taught that Washington expressed great aspirations referring to the new
nation as a "rising empire" even at its birth and backed his sentiments
with deeds to help make it one. He did it during the Revolutionary War
by his savage acts against native Indians, all of whom he considered
subhumans (or American Untermenschen). He compared them to wolves and
"beasts of prey" and called for their total destruction much like the
way George Bush today calls for defeating "terrorists" less
well-defined than the ones Washington's had in mind and went about
destroying ruthlessly.

He dispatched General John Sulivan and 5,000 troops to attack the
noncombatant Onondaga people in 1779 with orders to destroy all their
villages, homes, fields, food supplies, cattle herds and orchards in a
scorched earth campaign to annihilate them. He wanted to kill as many
as possible and did. He also wanted their land (like Bush today wants
Iraq's oil) and took it by force, including from the Onieda people who
aided Washington when he most needed help at Valley Forge. The truth
about the nation's "Father," kept out of young minds in school, was our
first president and all others after him pursued a policy of genocide
against the nation's original inhabitants who lived mainly in peace for
thousands of years on the lands we came uninvited to and took from
them.

It began in 1492 when Columbus and those with him first arrived in
what's now Haiti exterminating virtually the entire estimated eight
million native Arawak, or Taino, people. The genocidal slaughter of all
North, South and Central American Indian peoples followed reducing
their population by about 100 million or as much as 98% of their
original numbers. This is our shameful legacy of a new nation conceived
as a great democratic experiment never tried before in the West outside
of ancient Athens for a few decades but only for a privileged minority
in it then and now.

It was never intended to be one for the nation's indigenous peoples.
Their presence impeded what came to be known by the 1840s as the our
"Manifest Destiny," or virtual divine right, to expand west and south
seizing all the land from coast to coast south of Canada from the
people living on it who were exterminated as well as Texas and the
northern half of Mexico we wanted including the prized possession of
California.

Also excluded from our grand vision were the many millions of black
African captives sold into slavery and sent to their harsh fate in the
new world "democracy" where those surviving the oppressive Middle
Passage voyage, at the cost of 50 million lives lost some believe, were
held in brutal bondage as human property to serve against their will or
be sold like commodities to another master.

This is the true legacy of Presidents' Day. It commemorates the
nation's leaders who led the nation making it grow by a state policy of
genocide and imperial expansion for wealth and power at the expense of
those in the way of the privileged class whose only concern for
ordinary people was and still is the use they could get from them. Try
finding that history in a secondary or college text (unless Howard Zinn
or a few others wrote it) or mentioned in the corporate-controlled
media the next time this day of dishonor is observed.

Easter

Easter is a day of great religious significance, but only for
Christians who worship Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus Christ. It's not
observed by many around the country or world of other religious faiths
or none at all. Still, in the US, Christian observances take on special
meaning in a nation first settled and founded by those of Christian
faith even though most came for secular reasons, not to escape
religious persecution. The Founders believed church and state should be
separated, and Jefferson first spoke of "a wall of separation" between
the two in 1802 after freedom of religion was mandated in the First
Amendment to the Constitution that came into force in 1791.

Still, throughout our history, many believed the nation was a Christian
one and tried to tear down the separation wall the Founders erected.
That view became especially prominent since the ascendancy of
neoconservative influence, beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan
in 1980, as these hard-liners want the country governed by Christian
principles, including Judaic ones as well, but give short shrift to
others and demonizing them the way Islam is now condemned as something
synonymous with "terrorism" and "Islamofascism."

In the US today, all Christian holidays of importance get prominent
mention and due reverence paid them, especially Christmas and Easter,
the two holiest days in the Christian calendar. Prominent Jews, too,
aren't ignored, many have near-equal status with Christians, and most
non-Jews in the country know about special Jewish holy days like the
Yom Kippur Day of Atonement and Rosh Hashanah New Year even if they're
not sure why they're commemorated.

But try finding any mention of a Muslim holy day other than a general
recognition of Ramadan (established in the year 638) without
explanation of what the month-long observance in the 9th month of the
Islamic calendar signifies. This period is considered the most
important and blessed month of the Islamic year, and it's believed
there are about as many Muslims in the US as Jews as well as about 1.8
billion of them worldwide (compared to an estimated 13.3 million Jews
overall in 2002), a number surely large enough to warrant its adherents
respect but instead only finds them wrongly condemned as a collective
Antichrist and threat to national security.

Easter is commemorated between late March and late April (and early
April to early May in Eastern Christianity little known about in the
US) and is also known as Resurrection Day. It's the most important
religious feast of the Christian liturgical year and thus gets due
prominence in prayer and public displays of religious observance. But
Americanized flair goes much further taking full advantage of a chance
to commercialize almost anything. So around this period there are
Easter Sunday parades and other non-religious promotional activities
and expressions that always manage to be emphasized - even on the day
celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which observers believe
occurred on the third day following his death by crucifixion between 27
and 33 AD. The Roman Catholic Church gives this period special
recognition with an eight day feast called the Octave of Easter. It's
also the time of year when the Jewish seven day period of Passover is
commemorated, marking the Exodus of the Israelites from enslavement in
Egypt, that also now gets more prominent mention in the country as part
of the effort to market anything, even important religious days and
periods of observance, but only ones celebrated by Christians and Jews.

In a nation obsessed with and addicted to a culture of consumerism,
even marketing the Almighty is fair game. Easter then, like other
holidays and special days in the calendar, is just another day to be
exploited for profit along with it being observed for the event and
significance it commemorates. It's a subject left for the end of this
essay when its most frenzied expression arrives between Thanksgiving
and the New Year celebration. It's the time of year when corporate
America's only interest in the spirit of the season is how to make a
buck out of it - as many as possible because that's the make-or-break
time of year they rely on and must do well in to have the year overall
be successful for owners and/or shareholders. So with Thanksgiving
dinner still being digested, they practically scream "let the holiday
shopping begin," and let it continue right into the new year almost
unabated.

It happens on Easter as well, whether it's new outfits for the season,
a day or two on the town, vacation travel or any other way the business
community can exploit an occasion to get the public to part with its
resources spent on everything imaginable people never knew they needed
or wanted until the power of round the clock advertising convinced them
their lives would be unfulfilled without them. Discussion of this
subject will be picked up later in this essay to show it's quite
acceptable to exploit a religious holy day for profit even if it
corrupts the reason it's commemorated that should be an occasion for
solemnity and not for the consumerism that defiles it. But corporate
bottom lines aren't enhanced by religious reverence or observance - at
least not until the big business finds ways to sell its wares in places
and at times of worship and can get away with it. It's hard to imagine
they're not trying to figure out how to do it.

Memorial and Veterans Days

Because both days are related, they're discussed under a single
heading. The first, Memorial Day, is commemorated on the last Monday in
May and was first observed in 1866 and called Decoration Day beginning
in 1868. Usage of Memorial Day wasn't common until after WW II and
wasn't the holiday's official name until federal law called it that in
1967. The day is an occasion to honor the nation's men and women who
died in military service to the country. More on that in a moment.

Veterans Day was formerly known as Armistice Day, or Remembrance Day in
Europe, that originally commemorated the end of WW I on the 11th hour
of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year in 1918 when the guns
went silent, or were supposed to. It was first observed in the US in
1919 and made a legal holiday here in 1938. In June, 1954, Congress
enacted legislation changing the holiday's name to Veterans Day.

Both holidays would never be needed in a nation dedicated to peace, but
one committed to perpetual war for an unattainable peace dishonors its
youth in life and disingenuously honors those who died in imperial wars
for conquest and plunder. Nations waging wars only guarantee more of
them in an endless cycle of violence, militarism, brutality and
shameless inhumanity to those made to suffer and die in combat theaters
- so the privileged who get to stay home can profit from them.

People don't want wars but can always be made to support and fight in
them using the proven method of choice that always works - fear based
on shameless lies and deception by governments with hidden motives
unrevealed because who would go along with them if they did. Only by
deceitfully scaring people enough to believe the nation's security is
threatened will they support foreign wars and fight in them thinking
they have no other choice. When traumatized enough, those wanting peace
can be convinced to go along with the most outlandish schemes planned
that if ever explained would be condemned and never supported.

If people only knew the wisdom of iconic investigative journalist IF
Stone, they'd know in times of war, or events leading to it, truth is
the first casualty. He told young journalists that "All governments are
run by liars and nothing they say (about anything) should be believed,
and on another occasion shortened it saying, "All governments lie."

Serial lying is the defining characteristic of the Bush administration,
but all others earlier were duplicitous as well including the one led
by the Republican former president just passed whose short two and a
half year tenure only gave him less time to commit fewer crimes of war
and against humanity. He managed to do his best with the time he had,
yet we honor him instead of exposing his shameless acts deserving
condemnation.

It's almost like it's preordained and in the country's DNA that this
nation is warrior state sending its expendable youth to fight and die
in foreign wars but not for national security, honor or the rights of
free people anywhere. It's always for wealth and power that conquest
and plunder afford the privileged who get to stay home safe and in
comfort letting others do their dying and then shamelessly hold a day
of remembrance honoring them for their sacrifice. This is the long
tradition of this nation that since inception in 1776 has been at war
with one or more adversaries every year without exception from that
time to the present.

These two federal holidays warrant special condemnation. They represent
a galling legacy of endless wars and false patriotic glorification of
them including the so-called "good" one about which there was nothing
good at all. Choosing days to honor the dead who sacrificed everything
is a sacrilege and failure to note they died in vain on the alter of
power and privilege for the few. Their deaths assure an unending cycle
of violence and killing with legions of nameless, faceless grave sites
ahead known only to those experiencing unconscionable loss.

These commemorative days stand above the others as symbols of this
nation's depravity and ultimate crime against humanity and wasted lives
it's taken. They ignore what Lincoln hoped for at Gettysburg in
November, 1863 when he said "we here resolve that these dead shall not
have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of
freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the
people shall not perish from the earth." He knew the horror of war and
understood for that to be they must end. He also feared they would not
and had to reflect that future wars would take their leaders to new
battlefields in an endless cycle of death and destruction wars always
guarantee.

Future commemorations of past wars should chart a new course - a vow
pledging they'll end, and this nation resolves never again. Remembrance
should then be an act of contrition and path to redemption, honoring
the living, and taking a sacred oath of non-violence promising to stand
by it for all time. It should be a solemn dedication to equity and
social justice for all in a state of peace renouncing wars and the
shameless holidays in their honor. One day they'll be no more wars
because no one will go fight in them. When it comes, days of memorial
and honoring veterans will end replaced by a Peace Day honoring the
living and sacredness of life so those past dead finally won't have
died in vain. Pray it comes soon.

Independence Day

Along with Christmas, no federal holiday is more celebrated than the
day of the nation's independence from the British Crown declared on
July 4, 1776. Coming in the summer with good weather across the
country, it's a day of parades, outings, and baseball at all levels
that many years ago nearly always meant so-called major league
double-headers that was a big occasion for young boys growing up in
"big league" cities whose dads took them out for an endless day at the
ballpark. It's also a day of commemorative and exulting fireworks and
other expressions celebrating the nation's history, liberation and
traditions - not the truths about them but the acceptable illusions
taught in school and extolled by the dominant media and their
disingenuous allies in academia and the clergy who go along propagating
the nation's myths.

Young minds are never taught the nation's real history, just what's
falsely glorified with all ugly parts about important events and
leaders responsible for them suppressed to assure a new generation of
"good citizens" is properly trained, just like the ones preceding it,
assuring those in it will be loyal to the state because they believe
the mythology about the country schools at all levels teach is the
greatest on earth.

We should commemorate the glorious achievement of our Founders and
their Revolution that liberated the nation from a repressive British
monarchy and aristocracy replacing it with an experimental system of
government never tried before in the West outside its imperfect form in
Athens in ancient Greece for a few decades. After the war of
liberation, the Founders met in 1787, in the same Philadelphia State
House where the Declaration of Independence was signed 11 years
earlier, to frame our historic Constitution and later our Bill of
Rights ratified in 1791.

It was historic and glorious, but much was left undone and to be
desired. Only white male property owners got the most fundamental of
all rights in a democracy until 1850 - the right to vote that should
have been federally mandated for all male and female adults in the
country but wasn't. In addition, slavery was a national shame until the
13th Amendment freed black people, who were just property until 1865.
But they still never got real liberties until the civil rights
legislation of the 1960s completed what the Constitution and its
Amendments left undone. Even so, from then to the present, African
Americans and others of color have always had far fewer rights and
privileges than the nation's whites, and shamefully our society is as
segregated today as it was in the 1960s before the landmark civil
rights laws were passed guaranteeing this would never happen again. It
did, and it's hardly a reason for people affected and all others of
conscience to celebrate on July 4 or any day.

The nation's native Indians have even less to celebrate, the small
number of them remaining of the 100 million or so throughout the
Americas slaughtered without mercy from the very earliest days before
the nation was liberated from the British Crown. Native Americans lived
on these lands for thousands of years in relative peace. It wasn't
until white settlers and "Western civilization" arrived that everything
changed for the worst.

When the first European settlers came in the late 15th century, they
were accepted and at times aided by the nation's first peoples who
preferred peace to conflict. But native graciousness wasn't returned in
kind, and it led to the great push West and South and near total
extermination of the many great Indian nations given no rights or
quarter in our grand new democratic experiment for the privileged few.
It was only in 1924 that indigenous peoples got any rights with the
passage of the Indian Citizenship Act when there were hardly any left
to enjoy what little they got grudgingly. Getting no rights at all were
the many millions never born because their ancestors were slaughtered
in cold blood leaving no new generations to follow.

Even today, in the 21st century, over 80 years since Indian people got
citizenship including the right to vote, no peoples overall in the
"land of the free" have fewer rights as citizens or live in more
desperate poverty and despair unaddressed and virtually ignored than
the original inhabitants of this vast continent for whom justice long
delayed is justice never gotten. No day is ever held honoring these
courageous people acknowledging their sacrifice for what the privileged
few now enjoy.

Why would any of them, even as citizens, have reason to commemorate the
date of the nation's "liberation" that for them only meant the
continuance of their destruction and denial of their proud cultures.
Today the traditions of our original inhabitants are unknown by the
greater public, they're untaught in schools, and they're ignored by the
dominant media that only disgracefully mock and demonize Indian people
in films and society as drunks, beasts, primitives and savages, noble
or otherwise. What native American could respect a government speaking
only with forked tongue and acting like real savages making and
breaking treaties, taking their lands, destroying their welfare and
finally their lives. The kind of "liberation" this nation brought to
the people of Iraq for the past 16 years, we gave our original
inhabitants for 500 years "liberating" them, like Iraqis today, from
their liberty and lives.

Others in the nation also have little to celebrate on this or any other
day. Today it's truer than ever in an age of extreme greed,
unprecedented wealth disparity, galling corruption and virtual
abandonment of the rule of law by an administration and Congress
uncaring about the rights of ordinary people anywhere. Through lies,
deceit and contempt for humanity, they created a state of permanent war
and disregard for the needs and human and civil rights of the majority.
They also ignored and exacerbated conditions for the growing millions
of poor, persecuted and deprived, who have no reason for joy on our day
of "liberation" that gave them no rights or "free" society fruits few
of them ever enjoy. Today, tens of millions of poor people, especially
those of color, are practically condemned as criminals for their
disadvantaged state, through no fault of their own, in a corrupted
racist society worshiping wealth, privilege and all the interests of
capital at the expense of those having none.

Newly arrived immigrants also have little to celebrate, especially the
unwanted and exploited ones of color from the South forced to come here
because their nation's leaders and ours destroyed their lives at home
by the oppressive NAFTA trade pact enacted to enrich corporate giants
at the expense of ordinary working people, mostly living south of the
border in Mexico.

Muslims from everywhere, including citizens already here, have little
to celebrate as well, in a nation defiling Islam in the age of George
Bush equating them all with "terrorists" threatening the nation's
security. Thousands threatening no one have been illegally hounded in
witch-hunt roundups since 9/11, held in secret detention, unjustly
deported, and given no rights including due process to clear their
names. Their "crime" is their faith and color in a nation
constitutionally mandating all its people can worship freely now no
longer valid and abandoned along with all demonized, unwanted, poor and
deprived peoples condemned for who they are because they're not white
and privileged - the only race and class in the country exempt from the
harshness directed against all others. Shame on the nation on its day
of "liberation" and all others that strayed from its founding
principles never granted to all and still only offered a chosen few.

Labor Day

Labor Day is commemorated on the first Monday in September each year
since the first one was celebrated in New York in 1882. Around the
world outside the US, socialist and labor movements are observed on May
1 to recognize the social and economic achievements of labor movements
and working class people in them. This day gets limited attention in
the US, but where it's observed here it's commonly to commemorate the
Haymarket Riot of May 4, 1886 in Chicago that followed the May 1
general strike in the city for an eight hour day leading to the
violence that broke out on the 4th.

Labor Day became a national federal holiday when Congress passed
legislation for it in June, 1894, a time when working people had few
rights. It took many painful years of struggle and strife before they
got any of the ones finally achieved grudgingly from management only
wanting to exploit them for profit. Only by organizing, taking to the
streets, going on strike, holding boycotts, battling police and
National Guard forces supporting management against working people,
paying with their blood and lives did they finally gain an eight hour
day, a living wage, on-the-job benefits and the pinnacle of labor
triumph in the 1930s with the passage of the Wagner Act establishing
the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) guaranteeing labor had the
right to bargain collectively on equal terms with management for the
first time ever.

All of it was won from the bottom up. Management gave nothing until
forced to and neither did the federal government always siding with
business interests unless and until enough people power forces
Washington to yield legislatively or face possible serious work
stoppages or even a national insurrection - all this in a democracy
claiming to represent all people, the great majority of whom happen to
be ordinary working ones.

Since a worried Congress passed the landmark 1935 Wagner Act and
Franklin Roosevelt signed it into law in dire economic times when those
in power feared the worst, the state of organized labor rights has
declined, especially post-WW II. They then went steeply in reverse
during the Reagan years when the administration openly showed disdain
for working people in its one-side support for management. It continued
unabated, under Republican and DLC Democrat administrations, and today
stands at a multi-generational low ebb. Since coming into office in
2001, the Neanderthal George Bush neocon administration intensified its
assault on the social contract government once had with its people and
has been openly contemptuous of ordinary workers with little interest
in their rights and welfare.

Since the years of labor's ascendency, corporate America in league with
government shamelessly denigrated unions and the rights of working
people to organize in them. In 1958, one-third of the work force was
unionized, but now the figure is barely above 12%, and it's below 8%
among non-governmental employees or the lowest it's been in seven
decades. Worse, most jobs are low-pay service sector ones because the
nation's manufacturing base and many higher-paying jobs in finance and
technology have been offshored to developing nations where workers can
be hired for a fraction of the salaries paid here or as virtual serfs
at below poverty wages to fill legions of factory jobs in countries
where fair practice worker standards don't exist.

Nonetheless, on the first Monday each September this nation remembers
its working people with a federally-mandated holiday in their "honor."
Some honor when it's disingenuously given at the same time worker
rights are ignored, forgotten, and uncared about by a government
beholden to capital and defiling ordinary wage earners deceived on this
day with meaningless bread and circus droppings leaving out what
working people need most: good jobs at good pay, essential benefits
with them, and a government that really cares by doing what counts most
- fighting for their rights every day. On Labor Day and all others,
that kind of reverence is off the table making a mockery of the day
named for the people it claims to honor, respect and serve but never
does.

Columbus Day

No federally mandated holiday raises public ire more than the one
commemorating Columbus, mentioned above briefly. It honors a genocidist
whose arrival on what's now Haiti began the systematic mass slaughter
of 100 million native human beings so this man and those coming later
could go home bringing "as much gold as (those sponsoring them)
need....and as many slaves as they ask." The lure and lust for it got
him 17 ships on his second voyage and 1200 men aboard them. They were
expected to bring back the riches they found including the human ones
headed for bondage. They went from island to island in the Caribbean,
took their native Indians as captives, found no gold, but took hundreds
of human beings instead back to Spain with the half or so of them
surviving the journey put on the block for sale like sheep or goats but
treated much worse.

The Arawak people deserved better. They were friendly and receptive to
the new arrivals, greeting them with gifts, food and water making them
feel welcome. They were much like Indians on the mainland - friendly
and hospitable enough to make it easy for those arriving to subjugate
and kill them because they came to conquer, enslave and steal the
riches of the new land. Peaceful Arawak people subjected to this
predation got their first taste of "Western civilization" with swords
and daggers that later were guns, cannons, and assorted other super
weapons of war matched against their simple and crude weapons by
comparison for hunting, not warfare. It wasn't hard guessing who'd
prevail.

It all got worse after the beginning and lasted 500 years with the
deadly cost to native Americans already explained. Still we celebrate
the serial killer who began it all, call him heroic, and honor his name
and legacy on the second Monday each October as we've done since the
first celebration was held in San Francisco in 1869. Today parades and
other celebratory events are held in his honor that include speeches by
politicians who desecrate the grave sites of the millions sent to them
beginning with this man who slaughtered the first ones as a predatory
participant in what was the start of the greatest genocide ever.

Instead of commemorating October 12 as the day this man arrived in the
new world (now the second Monday in October), Americans should condemn
it as a day that will live in infamy as it is by the few native
survivors whose ancestors perished by his hand and the many who
followed for conquest and plunder.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is celebrated in the US on the fourth Thursday of November
giving thanks to the Almighty for the year's blessings and bounty. But
most people wouldn't imagine its intent by the way they spend the day
replete with self-indulgent overeating of traditional foods for the
full four day weekend period when there are family gatherings, parades
and, most important for ravenous merchants, the official start of the
Christmas holiday shopping season beginning the day after the
Thanksgiving and continuing till Christmas eve as long as stores remain
open that are about as long as people want them to.

This holiday, like all the others, is also replete with mythology
taught young minds in school about the Pilgrims inviting native Indians
to share their bounty in a show of brotherhood and friendship with an
array of foods the early settlers never heard of that were indigenous
to the Americas and introduced to them by local native people. The
Pilgrims had nothing to do with this tradition that began with Eastern
Indians observing fall harvest celebrations for centuries before the
first settlers arrived - never called Thanksgiving even after they did.

While George Washington had days for national thanksgiving, modern
celebrations of the holiday only date from the Civil War in 1863 when
Abraham Lincoln wanted a way to boost morale and patriotic fervor of
the Union Army at a time it needed it. He tried doing it by proclaiming
Thanksgiving a national holiday for the first time. It had nothing to
do with the Pilgrims nor were they ever mentioned until 1890, and the
term Pilgrim was never even used until the 1870s. So much for tradition.

The Thanksgiving holiday is also a way to promote American
ethnocentrism and cultural superiority over all others by claiming the
Almighty views our society as special the way ideological Zionists feel
Jews are "the chosen people." It's a short step from these views to
judging all others everywhere as inferior, especially ones ranked low
in the racial, religious, ethnic or cultural pecking order - like
blacks, Latinos (especially from countries like Mexico), and today's
number one demon target - all Muslim "radicals and extremists" meaning
all of them are by implication and are "Islamofascist" terrorists as
well.

Worse, they and others are what "we" say they are in a time of
"universal deceit" when "telling the truth is a revolutionary act," as
Orwell told us. He also said in our kind of society "war is peace,
freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength." The public believing it
is a testimony to the power of the dominant media Orwell understood in
his day over half a century ago before the age of television. If he
were living today he'd be aghast at what now goes on where the dominant
corporate-controlled media and PR allies act as national
thought-control police programming the public mind into compliance with
whatever the country's power structure wants us to believe - to its
advantage and against ours.

Giving thanks on a special day of Thanksgiving also serves another
purpose. It has special religious overtones that in the US are
Christian ones as this country always was a Christian nation with over
three-fourths of the people in it identifying themselves of that faith.
It's been that way even with the traditional separation of church and
state, but today the thinking and influence of fundamentalist
Christianity in American Protestantism poses a special threat to those
outside it. This extremist movement became dominant in the 1980s under
Republican rule and reemerged even more virulently with the election of
George Bush. What's disturbing and dangerous is that hard-right
ideologues like Pat Robertson, who thinks it's all right to assassinate
foreign heads of state he dislikes like Hugo Chavez, are close to the
seat of power where their views hold great sway.

The US was founded as a secular state, and the Constitution's First
Amendment guaranteeing freedom of religion has been interpreted by the
Supreme Court as requiring a "wall of separation" between church and
state prohibiting the government from adopting any religion or
denomination as official and requiring the government to avoid undue
involvement in religion, its trappings or expressions.

That status is now in jeopardy following the introduction of the
"Constitution Restoration Act of 2004" in the Congress and reintroduced
in near-identical form in 2005. If reintroduced again and adopted in
the 110th Congress, it would turn the US into a de facto theocracy even
though its supporters deny that's its intent. Don't believe them.

Support for the bill is led by Dominionists like Pat Robertson and at
least those remaining of the 28 House and Senate sponsors like him in
the last Congress, who support tearing down the sacred wall between
between church and state so the US can be governed by Christian dogma
as they interpret it. It would make lawbreakers of those of other
faiths, or none at all, disobeying whatever parts of Christian canon
the bill designated the law of the land - a very scary prospect for
about 75 million non-Christians in the country and many others of
Christian faith who won't go along.

If adopted, this bill will remove the Supreme Court's authority to challenge the right of anyone in or affiliated with
federal, state or local government to acknowledge "God as the sovereign
source of law, liberty, or government" - the Christian God, that is.
Any judge at any level interpreting the Constitution otherwise would
henceforth be subject to impeachment and prosecution in the new United
States of America ruled by the Pat Robertson types of influence in it.
Anyone jittery? It would also likely elevate the Thanksgiving holiday
to one of obligatory Christian observance, even for non-Christians,
advancing its current optional religious overtones to mandatory status.

Already the way Thanksgiving is celebrated today in the US is a sham.
While barely thanking the Almighty for the year's blessings and bounty,
if it's done at all, no heed is paid to the many millions of poor,
deprived and oppressed peoples around the country and world whose
desperate state is the result of our government's actions. It also
ignores the systematic dismantling of constitutional rights at home
along with the denial of essential social services to growing millions
who otherwise aren't able to get them. And it fails to acknowledge our
own dereliction in failing to take personal action opposing these
abuses against humanity and the rule of law because we're too
distracted or involved in other things - like over-indulging on a day
to remember our blessings.

Those giving thanks on this day should reflect on their obligation to
oppose these crimes of state and the harm they inflict on others and
our own well-being. They need to demand real change by holding elected
officials accountable and removing those failing to act responsibly.
They also need to learn their history discovering how it began - that
the nation they call America once was the land of its original
inhabitants for many thousands of years who lived on it mostly in peace
until we, as uninvited settlers, arrived, took it from them and
slaughtered nearly all of them in the process for the past 500 years.
It's not just thanks we should give on this day. It's forgiveness for
this enormous crime our forebears committed most people don't even know
about shamefully.

Journalism Professor Robert Jensen has it right in his article called
No Thanks to Thanksgiving. In it he suggests we would go a long way
toward progressing morally if we replaced our "white supremicist"
annual Thanksgiving Day tradition of overindulgence with a "National
Day of Atonement" accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting
for the "original sin" of our forefathers even if our own came much
later or from a different part of the world. Establishing that as a
sacred tradition would be an important step toward a day when we might
really have something to "give thanks" for every day in a land with
leaders resolved never to repeat the crimes of the past and just as
committed to public service instead of only to an elite part of it.

Christmas

Christmas is observed worldwide by Christians and many others on
December 25 by tradition (other than the Eastern Orthodox Church doing
it on January 7) to honor the birth of Jesus Christ even though it's
widely acknowledged not to be his birthday. Along with its religious
significance, it's also a time for other celebratory events like winter
festivals, Kwanzaa from December 26 - January 1 for Africans Americans
reconnecting to their African cultural and historical heritage, and for
Jews the Hanukkah Festival of Lights commemorating their struggle for
survival and for Jewish children to serve as their Christmas with gifts
from parents just like their Christian friends get.

The Christmas season is also a time for what can only be characterized
as the national obsession of shopping and consuming that traditionally
begins the day after Thanksgiving, runs through Christmas eve and then
picks up again and continues into January largely resulting from a
compulsion to buy and holiday gift cards, year-end bonuses and other
resources gotten or borrowed to do it with - for all the things not
received as gifts and anything else Madison Avenue creative minds can
convince people to want then or any other time of year.

If one dominant trait characterizes American culture above all others,
it's a variant of the consumerism of the kind economist and sociologist
Thorstein Veblen called "conspicuous" in his 1899 book The Theory of
the Leisure Class. Back then Veblen wrote about the habits of the
"nouveau riche" of that era that had accumulated great wealth and spent
lavishly to display it "conspicuously" rather than to satisfy needs. If
he were living today writing on consumerism, he'd have to write an
entirely different book in a society hugely different from the one he
knew. His title might be something like The Theory of the Spending
Class or A Society Obsessed with Spending or Consumerism encompassing
everyone able to spend any amount above the bare subsistence level or
what's done for basic needs everyone has.

The term "consumption" originated hundreds of years ago referring to
the infectious disease now called tuberculosis or TB. But its original
meaning bears significance in today's consumerist society even though
the kind of consumption meaning to spend that everyone does for
essentials is worlds apart from gluttonous consumerism covered in this
section that refers to discretionary shopping and spending for things
people don't need but buy anyway with all the negative effects on those
doing it beyond their means or even within them as well as the overall
harm to a society addicted to excess consumption.

"Consumption," the disease, or untreated TB, was called that because it
"consumed" people from within causing them to slowly and painfully
waste away and perish. The analogy today is the great mass of consumers
spending beyond their means and relying heavily on high
interest-bearing credit cards charging up to 20% or more. It's placed
millions precariously in debt over their heads and growing numbers
becoming unable to service it because of unexpected financial
exigencies like from uninsured medical expenses. It's resulted in a
near-plague of personal bankruptcies that in 2005 affected over 2
million people, 30% above 2004, and may rise still higher in 2006 and
succeeding years unless people curb their spending habits. Even those
surviving that fate face an endless burden of high debt service handled
by monthly credit card and/or bank or other lending agency payments
that enrich them at the expense of borrowers never able to get out from
under an obligation grown oppressive.

This would never happen in a society free from an addiction to spend
excessively that in the US is extreme enough to be called a national
pathological dysfunction and diagnosed as an obsessive-compulsive
disorder (OCD). It's a psychological or psychiatric anxiety one
characterized by obsessive or repetitive thoughts and related
compulsions or tasks and the rituals employed to relieve the obsession.
In the US, it's an obsession to shop and buy, and the compulsion is to
go out, spend and do it. When done excessively the way it is here, it
fits the clinical definition of a pathological social disorder that
turns out to be deadly for many who get themselves in debt bondage
increasingly resulting in bankruptcy.

In the West, but especially in the US, many tens of millions of
otherwise normal people are "obsessed" with the need/desire to shop and
accumulate all the things they never knew they wanted or needed until
the Madison Avenue mind manipulating masters convinced them their lives
couldn't be fulfilled without them. Economist Paul Baran once described
their influence as being able to make us "want what we don't need (all
unessential consumer goods and services) and not....what we do (like
good health care, education, clean air and water, safe food, and good
government providing essential services)."

For those afflicted with the national neurosis of consumerism, relief
is only possible through ritual shopping and spending, even if it means
doing it with borrowed funds at high interest rate carrying charges and
the risk of future insolvency. Clinicians would characterize this
behavior any time of year as abnormal and harmful, but during the
Christmas shopping season it becomes a socially pathological orgy
rising to the level of an out-of-control spending frenzy.

It's also an effective societal control technique as consumers out
shopping or distracted by the vast array of other bread and circus
attractions around them (the commercialized sights and sounds of the
season to create a buying mood), are focused away from affairs of state
and all the harm those in power do through them. While people are glued
to their TV sets or out at malls shopping for the latest fashions, toys
or trinkets, most don't pay enough attention to their government waging
wars of aggression, destroying civil liberties and the rule of law,
cutting social services, harming the environment, and failing in its
social obligation responsibilities to society because they conflict
with the elitist agenda of power and privilege it wants the public
knowing nothing about.

They also fail to understand their over-indulgent consumerism feeds the
corporate beast allowing it to grow, prosper and become even more
predatory in a society based on savage capitalism, out-of-control
greed, corruption at the highest levels in business and government
using our misappropriated and stolen tax dollars, and iron-fisted
militarism and homeland security enforcers supporting an imperial
juggernaut on the march to make the world safe for big capital that
needs armies of over-indulgent consumers to help it get bigger. The
more we shop, the further it marches in search of new markets,
resources and cheap labor replacing the more expensive kind at home
that may have its future consumption impaired if if doesn't cut back on
the excess amount of it now.

Adam Smith, the ideological Godfather of capitalism, understood the
dangers of concentrated wealth and power and wrote about it in his
seminal work The Wealth of Nations. He explained an "invisible hand" of
unseen forces worked best in a free (meaning fair) market with many
small businesses competing locally against each other. He railed
against the concentrated mercantilism of his time like the British East
India Company of his native UK, where he was Scottish born, even though
it prospered quite well on ordinary consumption when there was no such
thing as the kind of consumerism endemic in the US today.

If Smith were still living, he'd be appalled by today's kind of
monopolistic capitalism that was unimaginable in his day, but he
understood its danger in writing about what he called the "vile maxim
of the masters of mankind....All for ourselves and nothing for other
people." Smith's work was important in its day, but in modern Western
society he'd likely have discovered there is no "invisible hand" making
markets efficient.

Today markets need countervailing government intervention (called
regulation) to make them work best for everyone, not just the ones
controlling them for their own self-interest that's the way they work
today with corporate giants allowed freewheeling unrestrained freedom
letting them quash defenseless weak competitors that can only survive
and prosper if regulations call for a level playing field where no one
gets unfair competitive advantage over anyone else. That doesn't exist
today as giant transnationals make their own rules, and they're all
stacked in their own favor.

Further, under today's neoliberal market rules, the compulsion to
consume exacerbates the problem. It lets monopoly capitalism function
like a giant vacuum cleaner growing ever larger by sucking into
corporate coffers and growing bottom lines all the resources from
addicted consumers including all they can borrow in an endless cycle of
binge shopping and spending in a culture gone mad with the need to
accumulate and overindulge especially during the Christmas holiday
season.

Whatever Christmas once was, it no longer is, and it corrupts society
and the spirit of the man whose day of birth it honors and the message
of love and faith he gave his followers. It came in his teachings,
deeds and sermons like his famous Sermon on the Mount when he said to
"turn the other cheek" and preached the central tenets of the Ten
Commandments that include loving thy neighbor, not killing and doing
unto others as you'd want them doing to you. The consumerist US society
is one of receiving, not giving; of accepting predatory capitalism or
at least not opposing its harm; of ignoring essential people needs and
rights; of swearing fealty to shopping and spending while turning away
from or not caring about our fellow men, women and children throughout
the year, especially at this holy time for Christians whose thoughts
should be on those most in need and what can be done to help them.

It's a sad testimony to our society and how most in it are easily
manipulated to support what benefits those with wealth and power at the
expense of the greater good of all others. Christmas in America is now
the defiled spirit of out-of-control excess unmindful of the unmet
needs of most others close by and around the world our culture of
savage capitalism exploits for profit. For them, Christmas is only "Bah
Humbug," and Santa only Scrooge - all take and no give.

New Year's Day

The first day of the new year comes one week after Christmas and is
just a continuation of the long holiday season beginning after
Thanksgiving, reaching a climax around Christmas, ebbing slightly for a
day or so and building again to a final celebratory welcoming of the
new year with another overindulgent bout of eating, drinking, partying,
and using whatever funds remain for more discretionary spending in
January and thereafter in succeeding months gorging on nonessentials.

The new year is also a traditional time for resolutions including some
with merit like losing weight, resolving to stop smoking and getting
fit. Most are quickly forgotten, and the most important ones are never
made: to work for peace on earth, good will toward others, loving they
neighbor, and respecting the rights of all people everywhere, treating
them as we'd want them to treat us in a society of caring and sharing
with equity and equal justice for all. Wouldn't that be a wonderful
solemn resolution for the new year along with a sacred commitment to
keep it throughout the year and every one thereafter once the holiday
season ended. Long ago in simpler times before the old world was called
the new one and was named America, it was that way. It can be again if
enough of us want it to be.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at
sjlendman.blogspot.com.